From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [404]
But he did not feel nearly so chipper next morning, when he awoke to the stiffness and soreness that is always worse the next day. Alma and Georgette were already up and had gone out for the steak and studied the paper. There was nothing in the paper. He did not have any appetite but they fed him the steak anyway, Georgette holding him up while Alma cut it and forked it into his mouth like a farmer forking hay into a mow, and every hour or so they made him drink a cup of the beef bouillon that, as Georgette had prophesied, he was already sick at the thought of.
Alma phoned in to Mrs Kipfer and asked for, and got, three days off. Mrs Kipfer did not believe she was menstruating, and Alma knew she did not believe it. But it was the time-honored excuse of her business, that the favorites could get by with, just like the dead-grandmother-furlough in the Army, that the favorites could always get away with; nobody was expected to believe it.
They settled down to taking care of the invalid. They made him stay on the divan until almost evening, before they moved him in on Alma’s bed, and they absolutely refused to change the tight bandage until at least the second day. He did not turn down the sedatives this time.
It was in the paper the second day. They had searched for and found it before he woke up. After they fed him his breakfast of liver and onions, they showed it to him. Right then, he would not have cared enough to have looked for it. He hardly bothered himself to read it when they held it up in front of him.
He had expected to see it in 60-point banner headlines spread over the whole front page, with his name as the hunted killer just below it in 20-point; instead, it was on page 4 almost down at the bottom with a bannerhead of 12-point and not quite two inches of type that was a marvel of brevity and said, in effect, that another soldier had been found dead in another alley of a knife wound, that his name was S/Sgt James R Judson, that he had been in the Army 10 years and came from Breathitt County Kentucky, that he had been Chief Guard at the Schofield Barracks Post Stockade and because of this it was believed that he had been murdered by some vengeance-crazed ex-prisoner for some fancied wrong, possibly by a recently escaped convict whose apprehension was expected by the Army at any moment named Pvt John J Malloy. The deceased, it said, had been unarmed and was apparently not expecting to be attacked as there was a look of complete surprise still on his face. No witness could be found. The employees of the Log Cabin Bar and Grill near which the body was found remembered the deceased who had patronized them that evening but could not say when he had left or with whom.
He had a hard time coming back up out of the pain of his sorely stiffening side that almost had him giggling again now, to concentrate his mind on it. But he was able to glean two or three things. Apparently nobody, neither the two sailors who had not come forward nor the bartenders who had been called forward, wanted any part in it, for one. And apparently someone had found the body before the Law did and acquired themselves a good knife, for another. And, after figuring quite a while, he came up with the startling discovery that the recently escaped convict named Pvt John J Malloy must be Jack Malloy and that, for lack of anything better, they were going to pin it on him for a while, for the public at least.
And this brought him to the thing he had been searching his mind for all the time he was reading it but had not been able to quite catch up with: that this was only